My husband’s face looks good on you, says widow

MINNEAPOLIS Standing in a stately Mayo Clinic library, Lilly Ross reached out and touched the face of a stranger, prodding the rosy cheeks and eyeing the hairless gap in a chin she once had known so well.

Sixteen months after transplant surgery gave Andy Sandness the face that had belonged to Calen ‘‘Rudy’’ Ross, he met the woman who had agreed to donate her high school sweetheart’s visage to a man who lived for nearly a decade without one.

The two came together last month in a meeting arranged by the Mayo Clinic, the same place where Sandness underwent a 56-hour surgery that was the clinic’s first such transplant. With her toddler Leonard in tow, Ross strode toward Sandness, tears welling in her eyes as they tightly embraced.

Ross had fretted before the meeting, fearful of the certain reminders of her husband, who took his own life. Instead, she saw a man whose life had changed through her husband’s gift, newly confident after 10 years of hiding from mirrors and staring eyes.

‘‘It made me proud,’’ Ross said of Sandness, 32.

Sandness and Calen Ross lived lives full of hunting, fishing and exploring the outdoors before their struggles consumed them, 10 years and hundreds of kilometres apart.

Sandness put a rifle below his chin in late 2006 in his native Wyoming and pulled the trigger, destroying most of his face. Ross MAYO CLINIC shot himself and died in southwestern Minnesota a decade later.

By then, Sandness had receded from contact with the outside world, ashamed of his injuries. Surgeries to rebuild his face had left him with a small hole for a mouth, and his prosthetic nose frequently fell off.

Hope first came in 2012, when the Mayo Clinic started exploring a face transplant programme, and again in 2016, when Sandness was wait-listed for the procedure.

Ross already had agreed to donate her husband’s lungs, kidneys and other organs to patients. Then LifeSource, a Midwestern non-profit organisation, broached the idea of a donation for a man awaiting a face transplant at the Mayo Clinic. AP

After a surgery that took 56 hours, Andy Sandness has another man’s face, thanks to a grieving widow’s generosity.